Safety issues probed at Texas nuclear plant

Safety issues probed at Texas nuclear plant
The Department of Energy announces its Pantex inquiry, sparked by reports of long hours and poor conditions.
By Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer
December 13, 2006

The Energy Department said Tuesday that it was investigating a series of alleged safety problems at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant near Amarillo, Texas, including complaints by employees that they were being required to work up to 84 hours a week to meet decommissioning schedules for nuclear weapons.

The complaints were first raised in an anonymous five-page letter sent last month to John Fees, president of BWX Technologies Inc., which operates the plant under an Energy Department contract. In a statement, the Energy Department said it began its investigation as soon as it received the letter.

The Pantex plant, which has 3,500 employees, handles the servicing of nuclear weapons and the decommissioning of excess weapons under arms control treaties. During the Cold War, it was the sole assembly site for nuclear bombs.

Employees characterized conditions at the Pantex complex, which sits on 25 square miles and began nuclear work in the early 1950s, as "degraded" and in disrepair in many areas. The letter also said engineers were being required to work up to 84 hours in a seven-day week and production technicians 72 hours in a six-day week.

The employees said the company was preoccupied with safety slogans, such as the recently created "Pantex High Reliability Organization," that were masking the stresses in the plant. "Senior management is distracted, losing sight of the overall picture and circumstances," the letter said, adding that some managers lacked specific experience in handling nuclear weapons.

"The consequences are almost too awful to speak," the employees said, adding that an accidental nuclear detonation would kill everybody in the plant, destroy the complex and parts of Amarillo, as well as contaminate thousands of square miles.

more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-pantex13dec13,0,7417424.story?coll=la-home-nation

Even when dealing with actual nuclear weapons profits and slogans are preferred to good engineering and human resource management. If I were king engineers working on such things would work a maximum of 35 hours weekly with an additional 5 hour of mandatory exercise and stress management programs to keep them in top shape. Nobody should be allowed to sweep the floor near a nuclear weapon after 50 working hours in a 7 day period.

People are not machines. They will fail if overstressed and exhausted.

I think you are confused about the case.

Reactor engineers frequently move from the ranks of the navy to the operation of civilian reactors. Handling nuclear materials is a highly specialized field that would likely be occupied by persons who would require training updates and conferences on a regular basis. I would expect there is some large degree of mixing from one field to the other.

There are at most several hundred facilities qualified to handle larger quantities of enriched uranium in the US. The numbe of primary training facilities MUST be smaller. A problem with one type of facility implies a larger problem with the whole.

Let me guess. A battery is the same as a bullet since both are made of lead, no?

If you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up.

The same enrichment facilities that produced highly enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project were the same facilities that enriched uranium for "Atoms for Peace" nuclear power plants.

The same processes (PUREX and modifications thereof) that are used to reprocess spent fuel are the same processes used to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.

US pressurized water reactor designs are the direct engineering descendants of naval propulsion reactors.

"Civilian" TVA power reactors are used to produce tritium for the US nuclear weapons program.

Commercial nuclear power plants and technologies were used by India and Pakistan to fabricate nuclear weapons.

North Korea used its Yongbyon nuclear power plant to produce weapons grade plutonium.

Anyone suggesting there is no link between nuclear weapons and nuclear power is "pulling your leg"...

nuclear weapons in what way?

I really don't believe there is going to be any "accidental detonations."

Personally I would be willing to spend many billions of dollars dismantling nuclear weapons, trillions of dollars really.

As it happens, nuclear weapons have crashed several times without detonating. In fact there have been many "nuclear accidents" involving nuclear weapons.

http://www.cdi.org/Issues/NukeAccidents/accidents.htm

All nuclear weapons should be dismantled and their fissionable materials run through nuclear reactors to generate energy and destroy and denature, through isotopic mixture changes, the material.

That requires the precise operation of the timing and explosive mechanism. The fuel should still be handled with the maximum degree of safety possible. Exhausted engineers would not even be close to that.